Your editorial "The March of Health Progress" (March 25) correctly celebrates the increase in life expectancy, decrease in infant mortality and decreasing death rates from most of the leading fatal diseases in the latest annual summary of mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, a closer look at the data reveals an even rosier…

David M. Cutler of Harvard University is one of the most prolific and well-respected health economists in the U.S., if not the world. He has authored numerous, often highly technical, studies of economic issues in health care, such as the value of various heart attack treatments, a measurement technique for imputing the “dollar” value of health status improvement, and…

Health policy analysts have long known that Medicare spends much more per patient in some parts of the country than in others, even after accounting for regional differences in prices and other health measures. Many assume that Medicare spending and utilization patterns are representative of the health care system as a whole, even though Medicare accounts for less than…

Abstract: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act substantially alters Medicare Advantage and, as a consequence, reduces the access of senior citizens and the disabled to quality health care by restricting and worsening the health care plan options available to them. Lower-income beneficiaries, Hispanics, and African–Americans will bear a disproportionate share of…

President Barack Obama has repeatedly promised Americans that if they like their current health insurance plans, they will get to keep them under the legislation he championed and Congress passed earlier this year. But that’s demonstrably not true for millions of senior citizens who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans today.
MA plans are the private…

Under House Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872), employers will face even greater penalties than mandated by earlier versions of “health care reform” legislation, such as H.R. 3590. Specifically, employers with more than 50 workers that do not offer a “qualified” health plan or pay 60 percent of health insurance premiums would face an annual tax penalty of $2,000 per…

Abstract: Contrary to their stated intent, the health care reform bills passed by the House and Senate would substantially increase health care spending if either became law. Based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives health care spending, these bills exacerbate many of the inefficiencies in the U.S. health care system, particularly those that drive…

The Senate health care bill passed on December 24 does not contain an explicit “public option.” It does, however, still include provisions that could put private health plans out of business. Specially, the bill would:
Give federal regulators the power to define minimum benefit packages;
Specify by law the minimum amount that health plans must spend…

Abstract: The Senate health care bill would overhaul the entire health care sector of the U.S. economy by erecting massive federal controls over private health insurance, dictating the content of insurance benefit packages and the use of medical treatments, procedures, and medical devices. It would alter the relationship between the federal government and the states,…

The Senate health care bill includes a well-known "employer mandate" provision that would require employers to either offer a "qualified" health plan and pay 60 percent of the premium or pay an annual tax penalty of $750 per full-time employee.
What is less well-known is that the provision would also tax companies even if they do offer insurance -- but only if they…

Suppose you wanted to prevent single parents and people from lower-income families from getting a job. How about imposing a $3,000 tax penalty on any employer who hired such a person instead of an equally qualified, equally paid person from a higher-income family? Would that do the trick?
It would do the trick quite nicely—but since no decent person actually wants…

Amid the debate over whether health care reform should include a government-run "public option" plan, everyone seems to be missing one critical fact. Even without a public plan, the reform bills under consideration would impose such rigid control on private health plans that it would amount to a government-run health care system - even if the insurance companies…

One of the most-discussed issues in the health care reform debate is whether to include a government-run, "public option" health plan. President Obama says a government plan is necessary to "keep insurance companies honest," but opponents -- and even some proponents of the public option -- say that a public option will reduce competition and choice and become a step on…

The health care bills currently under active consideration in Congress would substantially modify the Medicare Advantage (MA) program, imposing deep benefit cuts to partially offset new non-Medicare entitlement spending while reducing health plan choices for seniors and bending the cost curve in the wrong direction.
Over 9.9 million seniors would be restricted from…

The debate over health-care reform has sparked all sorts of
controversy over costs, regulations and choices. But one 'feature'
seems to have escaped notice: the built-in lack of accountability
of our elected leaders for what health care will be like after the
plan is implemented.
Proponents claim we need reform now to solve an immediate health
care "crisis." "If…

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